What Is Important In Reading In Middle Level Classrooms: A Survey of Classroom Teachers\u27 Perceptions

Should reading instruction in middle level schools be aimed at helping youngsters to acquire more specific, isolated skills of how to read? Or should the focus of reading in middle level schools be on assisting learners to become readers? An answer to both of these critical questions might be — yes. Middle level learners (10 to 14 years old) should grow both in their skillfulness as readers and in the process of becoming readers. Research data and current instructional practices can be found to support both of these positions

Allocation of time in reading

How teachers allocated instructional time in reading classes served as the focus of this study. Twenty teachers were observed during reading sessions to answer two research questions. For question 1, how do teachers allocate time, observations indicated that teachers used class time in the following increments: reading and responding 35.47%; listening and discussing 24.89%; waiting 8.36%; completing skill development activities 20.28%; telling, writing, and narrating 7.52%; and devoting 3.47% of the remaining instructional time to other activities. Question 2, does time allocated for reading coordinated text exceed more than 50% of the total time designated for reading instruction, answer appeared to be no. Teachers observed in this study allocated only 35% of instructional time for children to read and respond to concentrated amounts of coordinated text. Recommended time allocations that stated that time reading should exceed the time allocated to all other reading class activities was not observed

Estimating the Spatial Extent of Bottom-Water Hypoxia and Habitat Degradation in a Shallow Estuary

Bottom-water hypoxia (≤ 2 mg 1-1 dissolved oxygen [DO]) greatly modifies the benthic habitat of estuaries, depending upon spatial extent, duration, and frequency. Bottom-water hypoxia often develops under conditions of density stratification, which inhibits vertical mixing, and warm temperatures, which enhance biological oxygen demand. Long-term, mid-channel data from the Neuse River Estuary in North Carolina permitted evaluation of how stratification and temperature combined to affect DO concentrations at the bottom. Salinity stratification (DS) and water temperature (T) explained respectively 30 and 23% of the variance in bottom-water DO concentrations. The amount of salinity stratification required to induce bottom-water hypoxia declined with increasing water temperature. About 80% of observed hydrographic profiles exhibited bottom hypoxia when DS exceeded 5 psu and T exceeded 20°C. Using cross-channel hydrographic surveys as verification, we derived a general set of methods to estimate the lateral extent of low-DO bottom water from midchannel hydrographic profiles. The method involves cross-estuary and along-estuary extrapolation based on assumption of a flat oxycline. Occasional violation of this assumption resulted in modest overestimation in cross-channel extent of low DO. Application of this method produced estimates ranging from 0 to 116 km2 of bottom area (0 to 42% of the estuarine study area) exposed to hypoxia over all sample dates in summer 1997. The maximal bottom area exposed to hypoxia corresponded closely with an independent estimate of the area (100 km2) that experienced almost complete mortality of Macoma spp. clams, the key benthic resource for demersal fishes and crabs. Consequently, mid-channel hydrographic profiles taken along the mid-channel of the estuary can be employed to assess the spatial scale of bottom habitat degradation due to hypoxia

Characterization of maize roothairless6 which encodes a D-type cellulose synthase and controls the switch from bulge formation to tip growth

Citation: Li, L., Hey, S., Liu, S. Z., Liu, Q., McNinch, C., Hu, H. C., . . . Hochholdinger, F. (2016). Characterization of maize roothairless6 which encodes a D-type cellulose synthase and controls the switch from bulge formation to tip growth. Scientific Reports, 6, 12. doi:10.1038/srep34395Root hairs are tubular extensions of the epidermis. Root hairs of the monogenic recessive maize mutant roothairless 6 (rth6) are arrested after bulge formation during the transition to tip growth and display a rough cell surface. BSR-Seq in combination with Seq-walking and subsequent analyses of four independently generated mutant alleles established that rth6 encodes CSLD5 a plasma membrane localized 129 kD D-type cellulose synthase with eight transmembrane domains. Cellulose synthases are required for the biosynthesis of cellulose, the most abundant biopolymer of plant cell walls. Phylogenetic analyses revealed that RTH6 is part of a monocot specific clade of D-type cellulose synthases. D-type cellulose synthases are highly conserved in the plant kingdom with five gene family members in maize and homologs even among early land plants such as the moss Physcomitrella patens or the clubmoss Selaginella moellendorffii. Expression profiling demonstrated that rth6 transcripts are highly enriched in root hairs as compared to all other root tissues. Moreover, in addition to the strong knock down of rth6 expression in young primary roots of the mutant rth6, the gene is also significantly down-regulated in rth3 and rth5 mutants, while it is up-regulated in rth2 mutants, suggesting that these genes interact in cell wall biosynthesis

Complexities in barrier island response to sea level rise : insights from numerical model experiments, North Carolina Outer Banks

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 115 (2010): F03004, doi:10.1029/2009JF001299.Using a morphological-behavior model to conduct sensitivity experiments, we investigate the sea level rise response of a complex coastal environment to changes in a variety of factors. Experiments reveal that substrate composition, followed in rank order by substrate slope, sea level rise rate, and sediment supply rate, are the most important factors in determining barrier island response to sea level rise. We find that geomorphic threshold crossing, defined as a change in state (e.g., from landward migrating to drowning) that is irreversible over decadal to millennial time scales, is most likely to occur in muddy coastal systems where the combination of substrate composition, depth-dependent limitations on shoreface response rates, and substrate erodibility may prevent sand from being liberated rapidly enough, or in sufficient quantity, to maintain a subaerial barrier. Analyses indicate that factors affecting sediment availability such as low substrate sand proportions and high sediment loss rates cause a barrier to migrate landward along a trajectory having a lower slope than average barrier island slope, thereby defining an “effective” barrier island slope. Other factors being equal, such barriers will tend to be smaller and associated with a more deeply incised shoreface, thereby requiring less migration per sea level rise increment to liberate sufficient sand to maintain subaerial exposure than larger, less incised barriers. As a result, the evolution of larger/less incised barriers is more likely to be limited by shoreface erosion rates or substrate erodibility making them more prone to disintegration related to increasing sea level rise rates than smaller/more incised barriers. Thus, the small/deeply incised North Carolina barriers are likely to persist in the near term (although their long-term fate is less certain because of the low substrate slopes that will soon be encountered). In aggregate, results point to the importance of system history (e.g., previous slopes, sediment budgets, etc.) in determining migration trajectories and therefore how a barrier island will respond to sea level rise. Although simple analytical calculations may predict barrier response in simplified coastal environments (e.g., constant slope, constant sea level rise rate, etc.), our model experiments demonstrate that morphological-behavior modeling is necessary to provide critical insights regarding changes that may occur in environments having complex geometries, especially when multiple parameters change simultaneously.This work was partially supported by the U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole Science Center and a sabbatical leave fellowship from Oberlin College to Laura Moore from the Mellon‐8 Consortium

Quotients for sheets of conjugacy classes

We provide a description of the orbit space of a sheet S for the conjugation action of a complex simple simply connected algebraic group G. This is obtained by means of a bijection between S/G and the quotient of a shifted torus modulo the action of a subgroup of the Weyl group and it is the group analogue of a result due to Borho and Kraft. We also describe the normalisation of the categorical quotient \overline{S}//G for arbitrary simple G and give a necessary and sufficient condition for S//G to be normal in analogy to results of Borho, Kraft and Richardson. The example of G_2 is worked out in detail

Quotients for sheets of conjugacy classes

We provide a description of the orbit space of a sheet S for the conjugation action of a complex simple simply connected algebraic group G. This is obtained by means of a bijection between S 15G and the quotient of a shifted torus modulo the action of a subgroup of the Weyl group and it is the group analogue of a result due to Borho and Kraft. We also describe the normalisation of the categorical quotient // for arbitrary simple G and give a necessary and sufficient condition for //G to be normal in analogy to results of Borho, Kraft and Richardson. The example of G2 is worked out in detail

Intracranial bleeding due to vitamin K deficiency: advantages of using a pediatric intensive care registry

Item does not contain fulltextAIM: To determine the incidence of late intracranial vitamin K deficiency bleeding (VKDB) in The Netherlands using the Dutch Pediatric Intensive Care Evaluation (PICE) registry. METHODS: The PICE registry was used to identify all infants who were admitted to a Dutch pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) with intracranial bleeding between 1 January 2004 and 31 December 2007. Cases of confirmed late intracranial VKDB were used to calculate the incidence for each year. To estimate the completeness of ascertainment of the PICE registry, data from 2005 were compared with general surveillance data from that year. RESULTS: In the 4-year study period, 16/64 (25%) of the infants admitted with intracranial bleeding had late intracranial VKDB, resulting in an overall incidence of 2.1/100,000 live births (95% confidence interval 1.2-3.5). The single-year incidence varied markedly between 0.5 and 3.3 per 100,000 live births. All five ascertained cases in 2005 were identified using the PICE registry, while general surveillance identified only three. CONCLUSIONS: The PICE registry allows ongoing monitoring of the incidence of late intracranial VKDB and appears to be associated with a higher rate of completeness than general surveillance. We propose the use of pediatric intensive care registries to assess the efficacy of national vitamin K prophylactic regimens

Orbit Closures and Invariants

The first author would like to thank Sebastian Herpel for the conversations we had which led to the first iteration of some of the ideas in this paper, and also Stephen Donkin for some very helpful nudges towards the right literature. All three authors acknowledge the funding of EPSRC grant EP/L005328/1. We would like to thank the anonymous referee for their very insightful comments and for pointing out a subtle gap in the proof of Theorem 1.1.Peer reviewedPublisher PD